Top Ten Favorite Social Media Tools For Daily Use

Top Ten Favorite Social Media Tools For Daily Use

Top Ten Favorite Social Media Tools For Daily Use2011-04-052017-03-17http://new-site.marismith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/logo-main-blue.pngMariSmith.comhttps://www.marismith.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SUCCESS-Magazine-Mark-Zuckerberg.jpg200px200px

There are many online tools I use every single day to manage my social media marketing effectiveness. In my recent interview with Darren Hardy for the May 2011 issue of SUCCESS Magazine, I talked about many of these tools. During our interview, Darren asked if I would put together my top ten list of social media resources for readers of SUCCESS. Of course I said yes – here they are!

(It’s a delight and honor to be one of three featured expert interviews on the CD that comes with the magazine, along with Peter Guber – author of Tell to Win, and leadership guru, John C. Maxwell. My audio interview is all about how to build “social equity” through relationship marketing. Plus, check out the article starting on page 38 “Networking With New Media” with contributions from Gary Vaynerchuk, Susan RoAne, Maribeth Kuzmeski, yours truly and others. The theme of this SUCCESS issue is all about connecting and the cover story features one of my favorite visionary leaders: none other than Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook.)

A fantastic free online tool to manage multiple social media profiles, pre-schedule updates for specific days and times, monitor keywords and analyze statistics. Plus, check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, @ mentions, Direct Mentions and more. Also available as a mobile app which provides an excellent way to pre-schedule your social updates on the fly. Paid version also available with additional features. (See TweetDeck.com as an alternative tool to try that is equally as popular).

The top link shortening service, ideal for Twitter but just as useful for Facebook and even email marketing to track clicks. Copy your long link and paste into your bit.ly account. Easily make custom links and track how many clicks you get. For example, this is a link to one of my most popular blog posts with a directory of Facebook contact forms: http://bit.ly/FBforms.

Check the raw link and stats for any bit.ly link by simply adding a “+” sign at the end, whether it’s your bit.ly link or someone else’s. 🙂 Plus, be sure to add the bit.ly sidebar to easily shorten and tweet any weblink. Another cool feature is the little popup notification of “trending bits” when one of your bit.ly links receives a number of clicks in a short time.

Easily build your own source of curated content by making a list of Twitter users in a certain field of expertise. Twitter allows up to 20 lists per account with up to 500 names in each list. Lists can be public or private. Anyone can follow a public list. (See Twitter List instructions here).

You might set up a list for top news in your industry (be sure to add your own name!). I refer to my own Facebook Marketing Twitter list several times a day to stay up to date on breaking news about Facebook. (See also Listorious for a wonderful compilation of lists to find and follow.) Here’s my Facebook Marketing Twitter List embedded in a widget below (make your own widgets here):

Adding a small piece of code to your website and/or installing the Facebook Like Button WordPress plugin allows visitors to your website and blog to share your content with all their Facebook friends. You can change the verb from “like” to “recommend” – great for placing on the top right of an entire website. Also, include the Like Button on all opt-in pages and sales pages for extra viral visibility.

I love the Facebook Like button for social proof and for quickly and easily sharing content with my Facebook friends. However, I must say since the Like Button changed from a one-line story to a full-on story with randomly chosen thumbnail and a description, I’ve actually been clicking on it less often. 🙁 I liked the one-line as I could click several links in a row and it wouldn’t clog up the feed of my friends.

If you’d like to test the like button, click the recommend button below for my blog – then go check your Facebook profile wall to see what was posted!

5. TweetMeme Button

This is the Twitter equivalent to the Facebook Like Button. Add it to your blog, website, sales pages and anywhere you want to make it easy for your visitors to share your content with their Twitter followers. I love to use the TweetMeme button myself whenever I find great content on the web to share with my Twitter followers – the button is typically already formatted with a short link and the author’s Twitter ID.

You’ll see the TweetMeme button at the top and bottom of this post – that’s the WordPress TweetMeme plugin. (In addition to the Facebook Like Button and TweetMeme Button, be sure to also add the LinkedIn Share button to your website, blog, opt-in pages and sales pages).

Twellow is the Yellow Pages of Twitter with tens of millions of accounts listed. Set up a free account, then find and follow targeted people by searching for keywords users have in their bio. Browse categories and also drill down to cities around the world to find top users in a specific location (see “Twellowhood” tab). Twellow is a great tool for building your Twitter following. Be sure to add your keyword-rich extended bio as the search feature also crawls this field! (As an alternative, more automated tool to try instead/as well, see TweetAdder.com).

Easily manage your Twitter following, unfollow inactive accounts, find out who isn’t following you back and more. There are many ways to sort including by profiles with no images, inactive, no bio and more. Free and paid versions available. This is such a fun tool to use and very effective. I haven’t found anything like it out there. (As an alternative, check out the popular tool SocialOomph.com. I use SocialOomph every day to auto follow those who follow me; then 1-2 times a week, I filter and clean up the following using Manage Flitter).

Mobile App for Twitter – I’ve tried many, many mobile apps to manage Twitter on my iPhone and keep coming back to Echofon. The app offers a variety of great features and is always synched with your online Twitter activity. Check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, trending topics, @ mentions, Direct Mentions and more.

Echofon also offers desktop apps for Mac and Firefox. (Plus, a Facebook mobile app! However, I find Facebook’s own iPhone app works just fine.)

A wonderful, user-friendly addition to any blog, Disqus allows users to have their own portable profile for commenting. Comments can easily be shared with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Visitors to your blog can simply post a comment using their Facebook or Twitter account with one-click instead if they don’t have a Disqus login. Try out the Disqus commenting system on my blog here – scroll down and leave me a comment!

10. TwentyFeet

An easy and simple way to track and monitor all your social media metrics. You get two social media accounts for free for life. After that, the fee is extremely nominal ($2.49 a year!) for additional accounts. Track your Facebook profile, fan pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube, Bit.ly, Google Analytics and more. TwentyFeet sends you a daily email with activity reports as compared to predicted activity based on past performance. (See also SocialBakers.com to use instead or as well for tracking your Facebook metrics.)

TwentyFeet – Example daily email

I trust you found some nifty new tools here! Let me know what your favorites are – feel free to list them below in the comments. It seems every day there are more and more new tools available to assist in making our social media and online marketing more effective.

Do you tend to stick with the more established platforms and tools? Or are you always on the hunt for the holy grail of social media tools that does everything under the sun? 😉 Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks, Mari, for showing my Facebook Face above! (Have heard *wonderful* things from a few friends that made it to SMMI) 😀

For those newer to social media, I can say that I use most of the tools above – though a new one or two to try. Mari’s recommendations are always good — go check ’em out!! 🙂

Hound Dog Social Media

I am loving Crowdbooster! It tells you what times of day to tweet to best reach your audience. It gives you stats on how many impressions each tweet gets, and you can search for followers using keywords. A definite tool for an social media marketers’ toolbox!

(I am not an affiliate either! Just a fan!)

Anonymous

I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that social media scamster Mari Smith won’t attempt to answer your “real” question, not after she posted these ten tools (all she did here is post Page 1 results of a Google search for “10 social media tools that everybody is using”

CJ Roberts

Favstar.fm, Klout, and Sprout Social. Klout lets me see the range of my or someones audience whereas favstar lets me see the quality and content of that audience. What are they faving, RTing etc. Then sprout social for everything else. Hubspot has there 1001 tools for checking every metric under the sun as well. Website Grader, tweetwhen etc. Or maybe GetSocialLive.com because I love using this to get some quick html and add share buttons to a post.

Wonderful listing and to be learned from! I’m interested in Twellow and TwentyFeet, because after the Social Media Examiner webinar I’m into metrics mode. Which reminds me, I still have a question to ask… Bye 🙂

Awesome list, Mari! I absolutely love HootSuite for desktop and mobile Twitter management. Bit.ly integration would be a nice enhancement. ManageFlitter has been a handy tool. Besides the inactive/no-follow option, it has a bio search for all the folks you follow. That’s come in very handy a few times when I couldn’t remember someone’s username. =)

DISQUS rocks. No other commenting tool seems to come close at the moment. (I wish the comments weren’t rendered with AJAX, so search engines could actually index the content.)

#11) PostRank. Outstanding social analytics for sharing and social media.
(I hadn’t heard of TwentyFeet. I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for the tip!)

Hi Mari, I just discovered your blog through this article which is really helpful. I use some of them and will try the one I do not know about. Thanks.

I would add the new app for Twitter real-time Chat : http://nurph.com. This is a brand new app which permits to gather our followers in a twitter chat room to discuss and thus tightening up the relations with followers, prospects and or clients.

OMG we have the same top 10 favs lists! I think Twellow, Hootsuite, and Disqus are my top 3 platforms. Question for you: What makes Manage Flitter unique to be placed on the list? What makes it different (and maybe better) than say Twellow?

I was already using several of these tools, but you opened my eyes to several more! Thank You!

Spenelopej

Mari, All these tips are wonderful aids for this newbie blogger. At the same time, the more I read about social media, the more I realize how much time and effort is needed to even make a dent in the increasingly busy world of social media.

MsIvorySeattle

This was very useful…I didn’t know what some of those things meant. I like some of the tabs on your tool bar…thanks

Monica Davis Heyden

Mari- brilliant as usual. Thanks for the hard work. I think Hootlet (Hootsuite’s bookmarking tool) is my favorite tool at the moment. It helps me make sure my Facebook shares go to my fanpage rather than my personal profile (where hitting “like” or “share” sends them). This article will be Hootletted. 😉

Monica Davis Heyden

My 2nd favorite tool is the Firefox plugin “Speed Dial”–which allows me to organize all of my most-used sites visually under tabs. I put all of my relevant Twitter sites (twentyfeet, twellow, listorious, etc), for example, under the Twitter tab along with my Twitter account. I never have to type anything into my browser. This tool saves me HOURS of my life! 🙂

Tristan

Great list of apps you have here. I almost have all of them except for Echofon and TwentyFeet. Thanks for the share.

Great list of tools Mari. I like Tweepi to manage (grow, follow, flush) my accounts. They’ve recently upgraded it to include sort by Klout – so I can use it to follow people who are following similar twitter accounts with higher klout scores. Great tool. http://tweepi.com

Thanks Mari for great information – as someone who has been slow in immersing myself in social media-you’ve bee a great help

Rockey

Thank-you so much for posting this. I plan to check out some of these social media tools. I’m currently on Hootsuite and I love it. I’m in a Social Media class this semester and my professor required me to start an account and I’m very happy I did; it makes life so much easier. Social media is the world today and I would love to learn more; keep on blogging! : )

Mari did u try Buffering your tweets. You should check Buffer is an amazing app for keeping your streamline active. Nah don’t worry the Buffer guys are not paying me :p its just that I am a fan of Buffer 🙂 thanks.

Davids

With so much to do already on two websites, I have trouble keeping up with the advances in social media. Thanks for posting these helpful recommendations.

Thanks Mari! I love hearing people’s opinions on various tools out there. Our Twitter scheduling and branding tool fall right in line with your thinking (efficiency!) It’s all about just 5 minutes a day scheduling quality tweets. Thanks again for the post.

I randomly started following you on twitter after your post about making the new Facebook pages with iFrames and I have been silently following your posts ever since. You provide so many useful tips and I love your page / blog! I’m definitely going to check out all of the above plugins. I just wanted to quickly say thank you for everything and you’re awesome!

VA Cresilda

Thanks for the list Mari. I’m using half of the tools mentioned above and i wanna try the other 5. Your posts and videos in Youtube are really great. Keep it up.

Laurie

Should I be concerned about my personal information with HootSuite? I need the capability to schedule Facebook posts in advance, but I’m not sure how I feel about all the things in my Facebook account they want to access.

I’ve got to check TwentyFeet. It seems to be a great tool for social media marketers who want to determine the returns of their resources and efforts they put in social media.

When you included TweetDeck as an alternative tool for HootSuite, I think these two should hold the top spot. However, what makes TweetDeck more promising is that it is downloable and can be integrated to Chrome. And it looks good than HootSuite, aesthetic-wise.

This tools are vital for social media.. Glad you shared it with us.. Thanks!

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CommentLuv is not the same – it just pulls in the commenter’s last post. Disqus is an entire comment management system that’s portable across the web. As a user, I’m always logged in so can easily leave comments on any blog that uses the system. I like their spam controls too as an Admin.

I would love to use disqus commenting system for doing comments. Its easy to understand .Approve comments in short time period.You have done a good job by sharing this post with us.Keep sharing with us in future too.

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Thank you so much for all the info! I really like the manageflitter.com. Everything is super helpful!

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It is interesting – very interesting. It’s going to be a tough, uphill climb for Google in competing with Facebook for the king-of-the-social-network-hill. If their social network has some sort of competitive niche (in facebook’s case, it’s public sharing and apps) then they might be actually able to find their new project a win.

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